Vera Rubin and the Discovery of Dark Matter
For most of the twentieth century, the picture of a galaxy was the picture Edwin Hubble had given the world in the 1920s and…
25 min read
Tag
science
The Fermi Paradox and Sixty-Five Years of SETI
The Fermi Paradox is named after a conversation among Enrico Fermi, Emil Konopinski, Edward Teller, and Herbert York in the summer of 1950,…
23 min read
The Haber-Bosch Process
On a July morning in 1909, in a small laboratory at the Technische Hochschule Karlsruhe, a German physical chemist and his assistant opened a…
16 min read
The Terafab Project
On the afternoon of 21 March 2026, in a press release issued from the Giga Texas site north of Austin, Elon Musk formally announced…
19 min read
The CRISPR Salt Pond
In the early morning of a summer day in 1993, a young Spanish microbiologist named Francisco Mojica drove south from his laboratory at the…
20 min read
The First Web Page
On the morning of 12 November 1990, in an office on the third floor of Building 2 of CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear…
20 min read
The Adapter They Built on Apollo 13
At 7:30 in the evening of 15 April 1970, in a back room of the Grumman Aerospace plant in Bethpage, Long Island, a 41-year-old…
22 min read
How the First Picture of a Black Hole Was Taken
On the morning of 10 April 2019, in a basement corridor at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a 29-year-old computer scientist…
19 min read
Why So Many Jews in STEM?
Jews make up roughly 0.2 percent of the world’s population, but they have won about 22 percent of all Nobel Prizes, 24 percent of…
20 min read